ALIVE launches book chronicling trauma program’s fictional story

By Brian Zahn

Updated
8:12 pm EDT, Wednesday, April 4, 2018

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Miss Kendra program director Cat Davis reading the book on Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Media: New Haven Register

NEW HAVEN — David Johnson said he did not initially want to launch a book for the Animating Learning by Integrating and Validating Experience’s Miss Kendra program. At Wednesday’s book launch, however, Johnson said he’d had a change of heart.

Johnson, CEO of the ALIVE program, said the Miss Kendra program is meant as an oral tradition.

“We’re mostly drama therapists,” he said, meaning the clinicians and mentors use acting and storytelling to deal with the student population.

Johnson said ALIVE has run the Miss Kendra program for 10 years, currently in 10 New Haven schools, and uses storytelling to help address trauma in students from kindergarten through to Gateway Community College.

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ALIVE CEO David Johnson

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Photo: Brian Zahn / Hearst Connecticut Media

ALIVE launches book chronicling trauma program’s fictional story

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“This is a public health initiative, not a mental health initiative,” he said. “It’s preventative, ahead of the game and upstream.”

The story revolves around a woman named Miss Kendra who lost her son, then turns her attention toward spreading positivity among students, looking out for their well-being and sympathizing with their trauma. Johnson said the details of the story were deliberately kept vague so children would be able to imagine themselves interacting with Miss Kendra personally.

“They have a caring adult within each of them,” he said. “By doing that, we can access that inner Miss Kendra.”

It was the vague nature of the story that Johnson said made him apprehensive about having an illustrator contribute to a book, but after auditioning four illustrators, he said Michigan artist Tanya Leonello was the right fit.

Leonello said she met the challenge of keeping Miss Kendra vague by making her visually non-descript — neither young nor old and with bushy curls to conceal her mostly featureless face — using her body language and the expressions of young children interacting with Miss Kendra to do the bulk of the storytelling. She also outsourced most of Miss Kendra’s facial expressions to her Golden Retriever; Johnson said the dog was added to the story when children asked where her dog was, not why she didn’t have one.

The hardcover book was given to 2,000 New Haven students and families for free, Johnson said.

Probate Judge Clifton Graves said it is not uncommon for there to be generational trauma within families, as one trauma factor leads to another within familial structures.

New Haven Mayor Toni Harp said she believes the Miss Kendra program is a “movement.”

“I’m so proud of New Haven for the way it has embraced being a trauma-informed community,” she said.

Johnson said one of the biggest successes of the ALIVE program is how it addresses student trauma during school hours unobtrusively, often before students exhibit signs of trauma.

Within the Miss Kendra story, the titular character encourages students to write letters to her, which helps students to name their trauma factors.

Community volunteers then respond to letters, so students all get individual responses from Miss Kendra.

Johnson said the one component of the Miss Kendra story that is used at all ages is “Miss Kendra’s list,” a poster meant to be displayed in every classroom of certain things that should never happen to a child — violence, abandonment, hunger, bullying and sexual abuse.

Hadar Lubin, chief medical director of ALIVE, said the work is not done.